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Biography

There is a sense of something lurking behind Dan Mill’s vocal on ‘Waking Up Dead’ - some black psychic miasma that threatens to geyser out of the song’s surface composure. One gets the impression that the strident melody and artful lyrics are the concrete over dark, swirling currents of pain and regret; emotional deep sea crude. It’s not like it was all bad, but the story of how Dan got to be here, turning melancholy into what already sounds like the kind of radio classic that Pulp or the Killers used to write, started out strange and then got pretty sinister. It might go some way to explaining the bleak euphoria at the heart of Eyes On Film’s sound.

Dan was a late addition to a family that was, unbeknownst to him, papering over the cracks of the previous decade, draining out some of the toxic glamour of 1970s Big Entertainment. Years of playing session guitar in the 60s with the likes of Little Richard and Joe Meek had led, for Mills Sr., to an exec producer role on the score for The Godfather. Months later though, the dress Daniel’s mother had worn to the premiere was sold to stay afloat while his father was being consumed by the business that had plucked him from the streets of South London.

“Something at that time had Dad sucked in, and it had nearly broken the family… The decadence and demand of the 70’s music industry I later found out nearly ruined him and he got out just in time”

Perhaps eager to protect his son, he kept quiet about the details of his employment history. Which means that this is all unknown to Dan by the time he’s a child prodigy, getting taken out of his local school on a music scholarship to Winchester College, dazzling on piano and violin, then smiling politely for beaming, well-oiled families. Only fourteen, not feeling at all at home in his newly gilded environment and grieving over the death of a friend, Dan decides the best course of action is to wipe his brain in as many substances as possible.

Private boarding schools and seven-day partying are mutually incompatible. Chucked out of Winchester (one of too many fights went too far), Dan drifted into connection with Callum [25, bass], who was living on the outskirts of a forest near Southampton in his car. Fellow members of the Young, Fucked and Prospect less, the two were a natural fit. Callum had befriended an older teenager, a Russian trust fund kid who supplied them with limitless booze and gak; the kind of hideous benefactor straight out of a storybook. Things were obviously going to turn nasty and soon Dan’s life was back on its entropic (non) track. Some very real threats to Callum’s family had to be sorted out with a baseball bat.

The incident made the two firm friends. Callum it transpired was also a gifted musician and, trading the baseball bat for something more constructive, the two took off to Spain together to play with various small town orchestras. For anyone unfamiliar with this world of pensioner-dotted plazas and Mozart renditions, it’s not so much of a transgressive cultural badland. The episode ended when Callum was thrown in the nick and the two had to leave sharpish.

Eyes on Film part one begins on their return to England, the pair playing something that sounded like a more electronic Radiohead to space cadets across the South London squat scene. Drugs were still a constant, and Dan’s erratic behaviour left the band in tatters before it had really started.

At which point, a Deus ex Machina. Dan’s Dad opened up to his son about the tumultuous back-story which had predated him, and offered him a route out of his downward spiral. The struggle that had so far defined Dan’s life, reconciling his prodigious talent with the likelihood of failure, a struggle made all the harder with zilch by way of connections and plenty of burned bridges, was suddenly inverted. The seductive and seemingly impregnable industry that Dan had felt might provide him with an outlet was now within the realm of reality. His father had the number of Andy Gould (Guns and Roses, Linkin Park) and Dan was able to get advice from a music bigwig given his first start by Dan’s dad.

Finally, Dan was given the assurance of at least knowing the truth. Also, he now had a reason to get cracking. Back in London he moved into The Cowshed, his friend’s studio in leafy Palmers Green, and set about monopolizing any and all free studio time. Up all-night and sleeping all day, he finished the demos for Eyes On Film mk. II.

David Temple [27] and Daisy Palmer [25] left playing session for Amy Winehouse and Goldfrapp respectively to join him on guitar and drums. Callum returned from what had been a sort of exile to play bass. Josh [26] inherited the role of keys from Cowshed main man Joe Leach, Leach ruling himself out as too old and too neurotic for the series of club dates Dan had in mind. These shows, mostly for friends’ club nights, were packed out and rabid, attracting the beady eyes of the NME and Libertine Carl Barât, who joined them on stage a number of times and can be heard providing additional guitar and vocals on ‘Waking Up Dead’.

An experiment of putting a studio in Glastonbury festival and appearances in the Green Fields led to MI7 signing Dan and subsequently releasing his early demos, ‘Criminal Mastermind’ and ‘Itch’. Which leaves us where we are now; EOF’s debut shuddering out of the system. Suitably for a song about the vulnerable state just after a break up, it comes on like a funeral dirge only to slip, through a patiently delivered series of dynamic changes, into blissful catharsis. The first offering from somewhere in deep in storm clouds that have proved to have a mercury lining.